Watermind

by M M Buckner

  Suddenly, everyone’s cell phone rang in unison. When Ebbs and Lima tried to answer their phones, they heard only pulsing white noise. Jarmond complained loudly that he’d lost his signal. Air traffic retreated out of range, citing electronic interference.

  Meanwhile, Dréclare conferred by shortwave with his hodgepodge team—sheriff’s deputies, hired roughnecks, the Pilgrim crew, and the cleanup gang Rory Godchaux brought from Baton Rouge. A mishmash of strangers, some didn’t speak English, and none of them were trained in traffic control. Dréclare tried to explain, through a severe snowstorm of radio static, how to direct vehicles out of the spillway. He knew he wasn’t getting through. The squawks coming back at him were unintelligible. But he kept trying. The crowd had finally decided it wanted out.

  Waves of pedestrians flowed down the levee roads, divided around parked cars, and swirled toward the exit gates. While Dréclare’s team yelled random, confusing orders through megaphones, people sprinted chaotically, trailing families, picnics, and beer coolers. Both access roads had turned into parking lots, and several drivers tried to navigate the narrow muddy shoulders. An SUV struck a dog. A family sedan skidded sideways down the levee, tearing up grass. A dune buggy full of kids nearly toppled over into the glistening colloidal stream. Dréclare watched and cringed.

  At last Roman shook himself awake and answered his buzzing ear loop. Remarkably, his satellite phone was still working, but Michael Creque’s voice kept cutting out as the colloid’s field distorted the telephonic signal. Creque said he and Spicer were standing by with their vacuum to catch a sample.

  “Don’t wait for my order. Start pumping as soon as you can.”

  Roman’s binoculars raked the spillway till he caught sight of CJ and Martin anchored behind a clump of trees just yards from dam. Idiot girl, she couldn’t have picked a more dangerous place. He tried to call her. But the phone signal evaporated. He couldn’t connect.

  Across the river, the derelict barges waited to block off the weir as soon as the colloid passed through. But the plume kept coming. Already it stretched a thousand yards long, and still more of it poured through the weir. It smothered the spillway like dense viscous oil, dampening the crack of tree trunks and tumbling picnic tables. Where it fanned around obstacles, its intense surface cohesion kept it smooth and undivided. St. Elmo’s fire spider-crawled over its surface, and its unearthly glow fluoresced against the levees.

  Roman focused on the catch dam. Lined with blue gates and yellow bags, it looked like a circus tent, but it stood ready, as strong as humans could make it. The Corps of Engineers had calculated its dimensions to contain the entire plume. Once it was trapped, Reilly would have five minutes to take her sample. After that, even she agreed they couldn’t risk any more delay. They would blast the entire volume till not a single chip remained active.

  But its volume had grown. In fact, it seemed to gather size every second. Roman measured with his eyes and did rapid mental math. The plume had swelled beyond their worst-case calculations. The dam was too small. In a matter of minutes, the colloid would sweep over the top and be—ilimitado. Free to infest the oceans, at liberty to invade the rain.

  Fire now, his mind shouted.

  “The dam won’t hold.” Jarmond shuffled back and forth, literally gnashing his teeth. “The colloid grew faster than we projected.”

  “My phone’s dead. I’ll try the landline.” Lima sprinted down the catwalk toward the office building.

  Roman seized Dréclare’s radio. Nothing worked, not even the signal mirror. The colloid glittered too brightly. Roman raced toward the office building, tore through the front door and found Lima cursing the computers. Their screens stared like blind eyes.

  “Power’s out. We’re disconnected.” Lima slammed down the phone. “Total communication failure.”

  The dam was half a mile away. Roman nodded. “I’ll run.”

  Thrum

  Sunday, March 20

  12:46 PM

  CJ fell forward in the airboat and covered her mouth with her fingers. She had no idea Dan Meir had just died. She knew only that the colloid was coming through the weir. Twenty glassy green tongues poured through the bays, brighter than mirrors. Where the tongues cascaded over concrete, emerald lightning arced and crackled, and when the emulsion reunited below the falls, light drizzled upward like brilliant inverted rain.

  “Glory,” Martin said.

  “Yeah,” CJ echoed.

  On and on it teemed through the bays into the stream below, pushing the brown river water ahead in potent six-foot crests. Soon the sparkling emulsion flooded the stream from side to side. It shimmered like pooled mercury. The crowds along the levees stampeded backward, and almost glacially, the dense leading edge began to roll forward down the slope. Catching at stubble and rocks, it used friction to slow its progress. But not even the colloid could resist the pull of gravity forever.

  CJ jerked on her headset and checked her laptop. The generator at the base of the weir had shorted out. The colloid’s EM field must have blown its circuits. But the fifteen other generators staged inside the sandbag dam were still pulsing music.

  Like a tremendous bead of quicksilver, the colloid slid down the spillway slope, pushing brown waves of river water ahead. It gleamed like hammered silver, and its forward edge bulged low under the river water like a cold front. When the first brown waves hit CJ’s airboat, it roller-coastered up and down, and CJ swallowed hard to keep from vomiting. At the dam behind her, the mountain of wooden pins groaned like a shipwreck.

  The colloid was so close, she could see individual veins of lightning shoot through its interior shells. Then she noticed something dark blocking the concrete bays. Roman’s people were moving the old barges into place to shut off the river’s flow. That meant the entire colloidal mass had fallen through the weir.

  Again she checked the generators, the pumps, the tanks. Yes, the vacuum hose lay in position. A deep pool of brown water had already collected within the dam, and the pile of weir pins slowly seesawed.

  She scrolled her laptop. All fifteen generators pulsed a synchronized musical meter through the pool. Her headset played the analog version, the real music. Max’s keyboard rippled in her ear.

  “We should move,” Martin said.

  “In a minute.”

  Her portable instruments were set up to read the colloid’s temperature, polarity, and field strength, but already, fine red hairs were standing up on her arm. A strong charge was building, and the hum vibrating through the airboat hull made her bones tingle. She switched from screen to screen, hoping to see some response from the colloid that would match the music in her headset.

  There was a soft sizzle and a curl of smoke when her field finder shorted out. Next her laptop. Last, the music in her headset died. “Harry, so help me.” She battered the laptop against her knees.

  Static rayed over the colloid’s fast-approaching surface, and inches behind her seat, the boat’s huge fan roared to life. She grabbed her laptop to her chest as the airboat swung toward the levee. Martin hadn’t waited for her approval. “Too damn close!” he shouted.

  While CJ clung to her seat, he accelerated full throttle, and the boat skidded up the steep grassy bank, throwing them forward. CJ’s chest smacked the aluminum frame, and she tumbled out.

  “Gotta climb up the levee. The water’s rising,” Martin yelled.

  “My instruments.” She scrambled back to the airboat that was mired at the water’s edge. But her concern was wasted. All the instruments had fried. As she pawed through the lifeless gear, the colloid engulfed and swallowed the clump of trees where they’d been anchored. Its crackling surface rolled down the stream bank and splashed her bare knees. Cold sweet vapor washed around her. When the boat lifted and spun, Martin grabbed its line, dug his heels into the mud, and hauled it manfully up the bank.

  For an instant, CJ lingered beside the rampaging water and dipped her hand in the icy silver light. Electricity stung her fingers. “Run!” Martin
yelled.

  As the cold plume surged under the warm brown water that had collected inside the dam, the level swiftly rose. On it came, thousands of dense fluid gallons. It pounded against the dam. Arc lightning flashed beneath the surface, and the pool of brown water boiled upward. Rory Godchaux grabbed CJ’s hand and helped her climb to safer ground while his crew of roughnecks helped Martin wedge the airboat behind a concrete ramp.

  When the brown water reached the lip of the dam, it began to trickle over. Soon it poured, then crashed in a booming cataract. The jumble of floating pins snagged at the top and teetered in a great rocking mat as the brown water blasted through their chinks with a riotous hiss of spray. Then, in one deafening crescendo, the pins tumbled over the dam and swept downstream toward Lake Pontchartrain.

  Brown water kept charging over the dam as more and more silvery colloid rolled beneath it and pushed it up from below. The level rose faster and faster. Soon only a thin sheet of brown water rippled over the silvery surface, and mere seconds remained before the colloid would overtop the dam.

  “He’ll get away.” CJ glanced around wildly. “Where’s the vacuum hose? We have to take a sample now!”

  But then, something occurred that not even CJ could explain. The level behind the dam stopped rising. Though the long dense plume continued to roll into the pool, it appeared to gather into itself and compact to half its volume. Scattered puddles of brown water sloshed over its platinum surface, but the colloid itself settled precisely level with the top of the dam.

  That shouldn’t have happened. Liquids don’t compress. The amount of pressure needed to pack liquid molecules for even fractional compression is enormous. But CJ didn’t stop to theorize how the colloid changed its molecular structure. When she saw it settle quietly within the pool, she crammed fingers in her mouth and almost wept. “You hear the music.”

  For seconds that seemed like eons, the platinum liquid surged and heaved in slow molten swells, thrumming like a million cellos. Gradually, the residue of brown fluid mixed and melted into its sugary emulsion, and soon a film of pure lambent H2O bathed its surface, refracting jewel colors—tourmaline, smoky quartz, mother-of-pearl. Its splashes rinsed the dam with afterglow.

  Its seething quieted. The static sparks evaporated, and its tremendous thrumming harmonics dissolved to a purr. In less than a minute, it lay almost still. Musical riffs pulsed faintly from the generators, which had miraculously not shorted out. And every human being within sight stood transfixed.

  Whirl

  Sunday, March 20

  12:50 PM

  Fighting for calm, CJ half-walked, half-ran to the panel truck parked on the levee beside the dam. Inside was the improvised control station, with the hardwired server that synchronized the pulse generators. A tangle of heavy black cables spilled out the vehicle’s back doors, and Rory Godchaux helped her climb over them.

  She checked the MIDI file. The setup was working perfectly, transcribing Max’s music into mild electric pulses through the pool. She studied the feedback from the sensors. The colloid’s temperature was still low. He was still absorbing heat. And the field had gained breathtaking strength. Something in the way the polarity reversed back and forth suggested a musical rhythm. She couldn’t be sure. Was that a downbeat?

  Max, I need you.

  Time was coursing by, so she stepped outside and signaled Creque to start the vacuum pumps. Then Roman came sprinting over the levee, gasping orders.

  “Kill it! Fire the pulse!”

  “What?” CJ thought it must be a mistake. When Roman raced toward the panel truck, she moved to block him. “We have to take the sample first.”

  She heard Creque’s pumps fire up. But Roman knocked her aside and bounded into the truck. He wasn’t familiar with the equipment. He fiddled with the controls. CJ climbed in behind and wrenched his hands from the keyboard. “The pumps are working. You promised we could take a sample.”

  He caught her wrists and flung her out of the truck like a sack of meal. She landed and rolled on the muddy ground, then sat up reeling.

  “That’s wrong,” said Rory Godchaux.

  “Hell yes—” Then she realized Rory wasn’t looking at her. He was staring wide-eyed at the colloid.

  Out on its silvery surface, a cavity had formed. It was spinning. Gradually, it widened into a whirlpool three feet across, then ten feet. The entire mass of colloid began to revolve around it. At the whirlpool’s hollow center, the vacuum hose dangled free.

  “You didn’t like the hose,” CJ said aloud. She hadn’t anticipated that.

  Roman stood on the truck bumper and watched the vortex deepen. Blood drained from his face. “Godchaux, get everyone back from the water.”

  Without waiting for a response, Roman returned to the controls and started the firing sequence. An instant later, fifteen synchronized electromagnetic shockwaves bolted at maximum power through the colloid.

  Blast

  Sunday, March 20

  1:02 PM

  A grisly hiss thudded through the air, and blinding white light exploded underwater. The whirlpool vanished. The colloid rose up in a great round bead, a perfect half-sphere of bottle-green glass. Then it wobbled and fell without a splash.

  Silence descended. The dark pool went mirror smooth, and its luster faded. All motion ceased. Not a flicker of radiance remained. Not a drop had escaped the shockwave. The colloid’s pixelating layers had melted into a single homogeneous drool.

  At the sight of it, sorrow wracked CJ like physical pain. She lay in the mud where Roman had thrown her, biting her hand to keep from crying. The colloid’s mass lay still and quiet. Still as death.

  Roman dropped from the truck and scanned his enemy with binoculars. “Reilly, check the field.”

  CJ picked herself up off the muddy ground and tasted salt. Her lip was bleeding. She glared at Roman with undiluted hate. But she had no energy for vengeance. She felt numb. The thing was done, over. The colloid was dead. She climbed into the truck, already knowing what the sensors would tell her. Yet she had to look. Just like the night she’d found Harry lying across his desk. His ruined face, God, her first impulse had been to run. Yet she had stayed and stared, absorbing vicious details like the lashes of a whip. Now that same acid need for punishment drove her to look at the computer sensors.

  But when she called up the data, wave forms danced across her screen. She flicked the mouse. All sensors showed active feedback. This wasn’t what she’d expected. The colloid was not dead—it was surging. Could this be right? She’d never seen such an energetic force field.

  A soft invisible blast pulsed through the air, stinging mucous membranes and shorting every electronic circuit within half a mile. Her skin went to gooseflesh. Her screens went black. She checked the Ranger Joe compass strapped to her wrist. The needle jumped in a steady 3/4 rhythm.

  “He’s waltzing.” She gasped, almost too excited to find voice.

  She sprang to the truck door. “Roman, he’s speaking!”

  As she hopped off the truck, its tires began to fishtail down the grass toward the water. Startled, she leaped away from its bumper. The colloid’s magnetism was attracting its steel frame. One of the pulse generators catapulted off the dam and plunged into the green pool. Then another. Michael Creque’s flatbed truck skated several feet through the mud, then hung on a rock, while his heavy pumps tumbled end over end down the levee. Behind a concrete ramp, Martin’s airboat shimmied and creaked like a live creature, but its aluminum frame wasn’t magnetic enough to break free.

  Workmen scattered. Roman’s binoculars shot out of his hands, and the throbbing magnetic field tugged hard at CJ’s Ranger Joe. When she unbuckled the strap, it sizzled away through the air. Hammers and screwdrivers zipped past her like bullets. Roman lunged and threw her to the ground, then covered her with his body, as every ferrous object in sight coursed into the colloid’s energetic waltz.

  “He’s answering your shockwave,” she said.

  “Hold still.”
He gripped her and rolled violently to the left as a ten-foot iron I-beam rifled past them through the grass. His fountain pen tore a hole in his pocket. From every direction, screaming metal split the air. The panel truck with the computers vaulted into the water, and its black cables lashed after it like a nest of snakes.

  For two full minutes, the magnetic field raged. Truck bodies, cranes, and metal tools sailed down the levee. Lampposts crumpled and bent. Pipe wrenches morphed into javelins. Every coin, metal rivet, loose washer, and screw rained into the irresistible pool. The green surface danced with froth, and humans buried their faces. Husky roughnecks cowered, and seasoned cops curled up in balls. Only when the colloid had devoured every free magnetic object within range did the noise cease.

  CJ and Roman sat up together, shaken. The water thrummed like a bee hive. Nearby, Betty DeCuir moaned. Something heavy and sharp had sliced open her thigh. Next to her sprawled an unconscious Ron Moselle. Roman gathered his wits and counted the casualties. Scattered up and down the levee, he counted seventeen injured workers. Their blood stained the grass. Abruptly, CJ vomited down her shirtfront.

  “Gracia de Dios,” Roman breathed. Then the colloid began to rock.

  Rage

  Sunday, March 20

  1:27 PM

  The metal-heavy liquid sloshed back and forth. Flagpoles, engine blocks, and chain-link fences tumbled through its mass, and sunlight glanced off their wet steely angles. Slowly at first, then with gathering force, the water hurled its clanky weight against the dam. Its blows rang like cannon fire. Max Pottevents stood on the levee, listening.

  Behind him, Rayette Batiste prayed behind the steering wheel of her mud-covered Ford Escort. Why Max had decided to enter this unholy place, she could not fathom. Yet from Christian duty, she had driven through Hades to deliver him here. And now only the Lord God could save her.